Democratizing the Metaverse, Building for the Mobile Web - CJ Hetherington

okay awesome let's go gm everybody uh my name is cj i'm the co-founder and product lead at atlantis world and we're building the web3 social metaverse by connecting web 3 with social gaming and education in one lightweight virtual world that's accessible to everybody my talk today is called democratizing the metaverse building for mobile web the problem uh with existing metaverses is because they have a 3d and immersive focus they unintentionally set a high cost barrier to entry what i mean by that is in order to enjoy a cmos loading experience and to be immersed in these metaverse environments users need to go out and buy the latest ipad or gaming pc right and this can't be a reality even for most families in america uh never mind when we consider regions in the world where the income average is much lower and not only that it's not only about income it's also about the availability of tech globally so i spend a lot of time traveling i spent four months in africa last year when i was in tanzania regardless of how much cash or eth i might have at my disposal if my macbook breaks i can't go out and buy a new one so there's a lot that we need to do globally before we're able to see kind of like mass adoption of 3d and immersive meta verses um so here is a demo that we built we've been building for eight months now we've actually stopped developing this version it had over 2000 active users and we haven't been developed we haven't been maintaining it um since august so we have our alpha launch coming out uh next week uh it's a closed launch for our founding atlanteans which hold uh one of our nft collections um as you can see there is a number of things you can do here there is a decentral bank building we integrated alve we actually won a prize from ave uh i eat global hack fest uh and stanley joined our discord um to congratulate us so he was very early on that uh and there's a bunch of other fun stuff you can do here you can see in the corner we have like a coin gecko price market there's a dashboard um there's also like gated text chat and some fun stuff like that but we've completely upgraded everything and i'll get onto that in a minute so again like i already said uh building the web three social medias by connecting web3 with social gaming and education in one lightweight virtual world that's accessible to everybody what we really believe at atlantis world is that by building for mobile web we can democratize access to the metaverse and onboard billions of people uh into web3 so there is so much fun stuff that this enables but imagine having a 2d pixel lightweight metaverse right there inside of your phone that you can drop into and be immersed into the web three verse or it's web 3 experience so what we do at atlantis world is take web 3 applications from all across the web 3 stack whether that's d5 dows nfts i'll showcase some of our ecosystem uh in a minute lots of alpha leaks by the way but the idea is you can take your little 2d pixel character right and you can run into a d5 bank and there will be an npc and non-player character inside of there that's pre-programmed to have a conversation with you and teach you about what is defy how to use defy how to deposit inside of a d5 protocol inside of the game um so that's something that we're really focused on is building out these mmo rpg style learning quests and potentially in future that will be incentivized so you can earn tokens from certain protocols for interacting with those protocols and learning about those protocols from inside of the metaverse think about rabbithole rabbithole.gg if anybody is new by the way to to ethan to crypto into web3 in general go to rabbithold.gg on your phone and you can start earning tokens right now for using crypto applications think about that but inside of the massive host did you have a question yeah it's definitely a limitation like there is lots that needs to be done there because it's kind of annoying to use like for example the metamask browser yeah i really love nia because it works perfectly in safari um yeah nia it's a layer on blockchain and they work in safari the near wall it's native to it it's really great and there's a lot of work that needs to be done there um normal walled gardens which is why i think building for mobile web uh is so so important um because we're not going to get ruled out by the app store we don't have to kind of comply or conform with apple or with any other big tech i'm super bullish on web because anybody can effectively you know build launch and deploy applications to the web without kind of uh any headache from for example the app store i mean look what happened with the with the fortnite saga and then also the potential for building things like player to earn mechanics um into this lightweight metaverse that's accessible by so many people really has a huge potential to redistribute value um and give some of that value back to the user so this is a huge alpha leak we have a problem at atlantis world actually we have many uh problems for transparency as an early stage startup we're really struggling with the transitionary period of going from a really small team a really small community regular community goals i mean we still have them but they're just getting larger right everybody knows what we're doing everybody knows what we're building everybody knows who we're collaborating with but now as we're starting to grow and we have like 20 to 30k users across our social channels sometimes people even call us scammer you know they don't see that we're working 16 hours a day and the reason for that is because we need to level up our communications game so actually the majority of these here are unannounced yet um but you can see some of our ecosystem uh the majority of which have supported us with ground funding and we will build some incredible stuff for and with them uh inside of the metaverse with the goal of embodying more users into web3 um so here is like a little bit of inside our alpha so first announcement avalanche they gave us a grant we will build an avalanche hq inside of the metaverse um so that basically if users are brand new to avalanche they can go inside of avalanche hq they can learn about the avalanche ecosystem and they can be guided by an in-game npc to connect to the avalanche rpc on metamask and then begin using applications for example trader joe on the avalanche mainnet you can also see here we have like an ave bank we have ens of course we will integrate log in with ens uh we have wearable we also run up won a prize from rarible uh at nft vision hack uh last year we will build museum and gamified nft marketplace for wearable you can see congee call that we love them they're great they're fantastic um here's an interior of the citadel so we just recently launched an nft collection uh we raised a million dollars from our community which is fantastic we've paused the sale actually upgraded our smart contracts ux and back end and we'll be relaunching it on the 16th of february it essentially one of the things that you get is getting access to our citadel which is the home of the atlantean dao where we're beginning to introduce and experiment with government governance themes within the ecosystem you can also see metamasks so talking about metamask and being onboarded into the wallet uh ecosystem imagine that you don't have a crypto wallet before you don't have a web3 wallet um you will actually be guided through the process of creating one from inside of the game in a super inherently engaging and interactive way there's also m stable we'll build the met meta bank that's fantastic there's a near hq by the way nia gave us a crown we love near they're fantastic um we're building a similar hq to them as avalanche and you'll also see harmony and cello down here uh and you'll see openc as well we're building uh a museum and a gamified nft marketplace for openc um so coming soon here are some more alpha leaks this is the first time that we've uh publicly shared any details on our more kind of mid to long distance roadmap so on the 14th of february we'll have our closed launch um where founding atlanteans will be able to join and help us with beta testing and a bunch of fun stuff and give us their feedback uh on the alpha we'll relaunch the sale on february the 16th for anybody that wants to drop in uh to that testing phase you'll be able to and we'll be launching our public free to player version uh in march in q2 we'll be launching atlantean characters with interoperable wearables game items and the native marketplace we'll also be integrating special audio calling so if i stand and then if i run like over here inside of the game i'm talking much quieter right so special is a really important thing for us to make it more immersive and engaging and a lot of fun especially with virtual events and stuff like that we'll also integrate discord chat bridging so that you can basically talk in discord from inside of atlantis world some rpg mechanics some law and then q3 will start to launch nations so cello for example they gave us a gram we will build a nation for cello inside of the metaverse where all of the gamma terms land parcels are tokenized natively on cello and all of the ecosystem apps so all of the d5 banks nft marketplaces dow club houses will be native to sello as well so it's really about creating a showcase and a home for the cello ecosystem inside of the metabolism and we will also do this for example for polygon i love the previous talk i love polygon i've been building on polygon uh since 2019 uh so super bullish on that when it was still matic we'll build a nation for them cities we'll build a city for one inch we'll build a city for balancer we will build a city for yearn we will build a city for perpetual protocol we'll build a city for everybody uh we will take a bunch of mini games from around the web3 stack and create an arcade so that anybody can drop into it and play a bunch of different uh web3 games whether it's battling uh who knows who cares whatever you can do it there it's it's gonna be really fun we'll also launch land customizability uh and this one for me is super important we will launch frameworks so that any developer any of you developers that are sitting in this room will be able to launch your protocol uh inside of atlantis world inside of the metaverse and really plug in uh to the kind of gamified onboarding pipeline that we're trying to create here and benefit from the network effects because everybody everybody's going to be together uh in one web 3 enabled metaverse which is fantastic um yeah i think i i think i got that one thank you so much guys um was a pleasure really love talking to you if you would love to visit atlantis.world we also have a wiki we have a demo live unfortunately you won't be able to access that on mobile so it's not really a great one for the mobile track but next week we're launching our alpha and it will be mobile ready you can also catch us on twitter and on discord and if you would love to follow up with me personally particularly if you are building something uh if you are a builder navigating the web3 stack i would love to connect with you and hear about what you are building and where potentially i could help i'm also a mentor at the hackathon um so you can go to cjh.tech uh you can also reach me on telegram the same or you can send me an email on cj atlantis.

world uh thank you so much guys i hope you have a fantastic rest of the time in east denver i think we're just getting started and it's going to be incredible and i also hope to see some of you at breckenridge doing some skiing as well thank you guys [Applause] okay guys we're gonna do some q a uh so if anybody has any questions um please do please ask them fire away what's up man yeah of course all of the game items and land parcels well like the land parcels and all of the game items are nfts so everything is tokenized and then stored securely on chain using ipfs of course man we don't sleep on that great question thank you yeah so the end game for me personally and and i think for the rest of the team is that in the future uh one team one project one community might be able to for example acquire land in the metaverse and literally set up shop there so like if you see these examples we have of like i don't know some some buildings like this emstable this is the metabank um and users will be able to go inside of there and it's essentially access a high interest savings account from inside of the metaverse so on it's from a technical like standpoint we're not developing that many smart contracts we're just using web3.js to integrate existing smart contract applications so we want to make it really easy so that anybody can kind of integrate their own d5 protocol inside of atlantis and then that that also you know makes it scalable because we've even had a problem when building our alpha it's like okay so we're gonna push this but then the partner protocol they they push the v2 or v3 rv4 and trying to maintain that is also difficult so we really want to like you know distribute and make it permissionless as possible so that anybody can build go wild build stuff yeah man sure but we're definitely trying to get that that's how i feel like we'll survive in the long term and that's that's what it's all about i think it's permissionless and composability and everybody coming together to build something great yeah definitely thank you man thank you much appreciated uh if there are any more questions i would yeah we're working on that so the general thinking is that we were i think the first 2d pixel metaphors but there are quite a number of them cropping up and we don't want to build something which is just like a walled garden and you know native to atlantis world and that's it that's the extent of its utility um so anything that we'll create on that side in terms of wearables or game items or it might even be integrating sprites of top nft projects we want to ensure that that's open source and we want to ensure um that it it can also be used in other like 2d pixel metaversus but we're working on that we're trying our best and we're collaborating with top people from all around the space to try and make that happen awesome thank you thank you so much guys and i hope you have a great day and a great rest of the time at eat denver [Music]